


Servant of the Mother Wood

by QueenOfPlotTwists



Series: 31 Day Yu-Gi-October Halloween Challenge [6]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Dark Fantasy, Halloween Challenge, Monsters in the Trees, October Prompt Challenge, Russian Gods and Monsters are Real, Russian Mythology, Sppoky Forests, Trees, dark forests, haunted forests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26860954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfPlotTwists/pseuds/QueenOfPlotTwists
Summary: To save his beloved Grandmother, and finally learn the secrets behind his family's curse, Yami ventures deep into the heart of the Vis'carra, the Forest Mother's territory to make a deal, and become the new Baba Yaga--for a price.Sequel to Butterflies are Like Secrets in a Woman's HeartPart 5 of Prequel to the Walking House or How Yami came to be the notorious Baba YagaDay 6 of 31 Day Y-G-October/Halloween Prompt ChallengePrompt 4: Trees
Series: 31 Day Yu-Gi-October Halloween Challenge [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947991
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Servant of the Mother Wood

**Author's Note:**

> Day 6 of my October Halloween Prompt Challenge and I promise, this will be the last of my Baba Yaga ones for a while--I've got plenty other ideas in the works: some puzzle, some dark, some libra...i'm going nuts!
> 
> Interested? Here's the link: https://horrificmemes.tumblr.com/
> 
> This was originally meant to be the whole fic and the story was inspired by the prompt: Trees which turned out to fit in more ways than one, but then like most of my imagination it exploded.
> 
> Day 6 of 31 Day Y-G-October/Halloween Prompt Challenge
> 
> Prompt 5: Trees

Servant of the Mother Wood

Yami remembers this place.

Remembers undergrowth and the long sharp thorns of briars pricking like tiny devil’s claws at his skin. Remembers dense carpets of ferns and the churning smell of rot and decaying leaves. Remembers the dark and the shadow and the wet and the cold, squish of mud, and his mother’s sobbing, the warm embrace of her arms and the scratchy, crotchety rasp of his grandmother screaming—the only time the Baba Yaga was ever afraid.

Remembers himself, a small child alone and lost in the forest: his mother missing, his grandmother gone, his smaller self calling out names and receiving no answers but one—

A voice: ancient, huge, eternal, without sex and without end.

He’d been sixteen when he’d heard first _Her_. Sixteen when she stole boldly into his dreams the night his mother died and his grandmother took him in.

A thing hungry and eager for a child who knew magics, whose mother knew the same: who knew the old prayers and the spells from a time before there where churches and witch burnings and the forest was a feared, fantastical thing. Who knew the rituals of the rich black earth, and the secret voice of the flames and the wind and the water, and balance of blood. It had come for him just like it had come for his mother when she was sixteen, terrifying her so that she ran away with the first man who would have her and abandoned him soon as she was safe and out of the woods, and his grandmother before her when her mother had died and she’d learned long ago the fear and folly of man.

 _She_ had come like a ghost in the night, but not a ghost, for a ghost had once been human—a phantasm of the forest, something had never truly lived and thus could not truly die and yet had lived long and live true in every acorn that was ever eaten by a squirrel and grew to become a mighty oak. In every blade of grass that had been trampled underfoots and rose to challenge the trees. In every fern and flower and fauna that had ever been born and died in the forests of the world and whose rotted flesh and fallen leaves had nourished the soil and spawned a generation of fungus. Whose bones and blood had sunk deep into the earth and mixed with the dust and the dirt and dead undergrowth and become the mineral rich soil that fed a generation of children and ever generation after it. A ghost alive in every branch and leaf and tree and whose voice was the howl of the wind, the rustle of the leaved, the creaking of bare winter branches and the grown of ancient wood shook by a powerful storm.

A voice full of promises, sweet and powerful and sumptuous and terrifying.

He understood why his mother had fled from it.

And why his grandmother had run towards it.

He heard the voice now, in this dark ancient place where the trees were old and massive: hunchback crones and stopped old men whose crown of branches hung low, their arms heavy and would never again bear fruit, even as their massive roots tangled and snapped and ensnared and raised the dirt.

Still he soldiered on, through throne and bramble, fern and flower, ignoring the claws catching at his legs and thighs, the long spidery fingers snapping at his cloak and slapping his cheeks—a whole forest of imps and demons and leshi determined to deter him and to test him. Yet he followed it through the maze that bit and sliced. A stray root caught his boot and send him crashing into a carpet of leaves and insects and dirt, and his nostrils filled with the chocking perfume of leaf rot, and briars clawed. So he continued on hands knees through the undergrowth itself. His palms sore and blistered, yet he followed the voice through ever creak and chink in the forest’s armor.

The crimson cloak his grandmother had given so long ago held strong against them—protecting him still, even as her life hung by a thread.

He traveled through a forest that descended into darkness—a darkness that was deeper an darker than a simple night-strewn sky, the sort of dappled additional darkness that only a night shadowed by the leafy ceiling and a forest canopy can create. A forest that was no longer a forest, but part forest, part shadow. A forest that faded and reshaped, no longer solid and single but of a thousand different dimensions, reflecting days pasts and timed yet lived and placed far away in miles and in years.

He heard voices. Saw images. A woman digging between the roots of a tree, pulled out a single scrap of parchment, thing and papery and heard her rage-filled screamed. “Is this all!? Is this what your promises are worth? How many lives have a pulled from fresh pink wombs while mine shrivels and dies!”

Hears laughter _WHAT US IS A CHILD TO A LOVELESS BREAST?_ Came the voice of _She_ , ancient and huge and disembodied and in the wind and the trees and the dirt beneath her feet. _YOU DO NOT L0VE_.

“I love!” The woman hissed, fiery and furious and fervent, tears blazing in her witch red eyes, flaming embers burning with grief and rage and dying hope. “I love!”

He saw another vision then. Another woman who was lost, who for so long had been lost, until finally, _finally_ she had been found and knew how to love and had it taken away from her.

She laid the corpse she’d had draped over her shoulders down by the side of the pool, black waters spinning and swirling, ignorant or ignoring the myriad of glowing eyes on her—eager to take and taste and devour. She growled at them furious and fiery, and all fled under the ferocity of her temper, her face wild her eyes mad with grief and love—for it always the mourning song that summons _She_.

“Is this the worth of your promises?” snaps the woman, fearless in the wake of her pain, her hands clenching the dead man to her, her heart gentle and loving towards him even as she rages against the world that took him from her. “Is _this_ the generosity of your gifts? To give only to take?”

She screams and screams, demanding, challenging as though she can anger the creature into coming to her, into demanding an explanation. When only silence greets the challenge, she lets go of her precious corpse to strike out at the woods, the trees, the bark, the waters until the body of the man she loves starts to drag and sink, and she dived to save it only to slip and tumbled over the side of the bank and into the cauldron below.

In this shock, Yami goes to save her but then the images vanishes, and he sees, he is a step away from losing the path and being lost forever in this place of ghosts and memories. Shaking back his resolve, stares straight ahead where the path, a vacant tote road that leads into to darkness and uncertainty outline by the skeletons of dead trees taunts and terrorizes, but he ignores them all and continues onward.

“You will not scare me,” he snaps at them all and even the imps cower and hide behind the trees. “I know why I am here, and I will not let you take her. I will _not._ ”

It is with this bold declaration that he crawls through the tunnel of trees, soaked in sweat and mud and forest blood. Rises in a glade surrounded by toothpick pines, their skin flaking, red and peeling, their once proud crowns a ratty patchwork of browning needles, their trunks and limbs a miserable gray. Treads carefully along streams of black viscous liquid coagulating like an inky black spider’s web. Follows the path over the log bridge reinforced by the skeletons of trapped beasts, their corpses and bones perfectly preserved.

He remembered this place.

Remembered the paths his mother and grandmother walked, believing him unconscious in her arms, but even then his young mind, the mind of a witch who could see things, know things, remember things, took in every detail and description through the haze of fever and pain. Remembered the spider web of roots and stream, filling the wetlands, turning the meadow into bog and all coagulating together into a single shallow pool—the spider at the center of the web.

And there it was: at the center of it all, donning a curtain of fog and ringed by roots and reeds, an earthly trilogy of rock, wood and water. The rock, a massive stone shaped like a lop-sided _dacha_ , half-submerged in the mud and muck, its horn cantering upward as if growing from the earth itself. Atop its roof: the tree, a nightmarish chimney in mid topple, roots spilling over and convoluting around the stone like monstrous tentacles, or the thick slippery threads of a spider ensnaring an insect.

The tree itself was a conundrum of alternate shapes and images, its whole body stooped and slouched over at a curved angle like a back stooped in despair, limbs outstretched like failing limbs and its branches draped and spilling over like the hair of a drowned woman. In one light it appeared to be the thin, slender, elliptical-leaved willow, from another the hunched arch of the strong oak, its leaves serrated edges, if a streak of moonlight felt over it, the leaves where the blood-stained stars of the maple in autumn. Its entanglement of roots all slipping, sinking disappearing into the cauldron in which the tree was stooped over—like a witch stirring trouble and predicting visions in her cauldron.

A cauldron was the only way to describe the black, viscous pool in which the spiderweb of streams emptied into. Enciricled in a rim of thick mud slopping down, overgrown with cattails and reeds, but the whole in the center remained: dark, wide, deep. The darkness there was an inky liquid of the same viscosity as the moat and the streams that fed into it like veins to some awful, liquid heart. Its surface glistened as if lit by moonlight. Mist and muck bubbled over its surface—a witch’s cauldron of secrets and death, its awful ingredients the rot and decay of forest life: brambles reduced to thorns, the skeletons of leaves and the fungus encrusted remains of rotting logs, the bones of small animals consumed by the muck—skull of a raccoon, the leg of a fawn, the fractured pieces of an owlet’s wing.

Water. Rock. Tree.

His witch eyes could see it all clearly even in the dark.

A phantasmal memory: his Grandmother climbing the net of the tree’s vines, his mother seated on the rim of the cauldron spring. The cool, slimy touch of mud across his forehead. The phantasmagorical image in the shifting leaves. Was it a woman? A man? A ghost? A fairy? A spirit? A Leshi? His mother’s weeping. His grandmother howling. The wind and woods and water all crackling as if the whole of the forest was mocking them.

He recalled then the sensation of eyes upon him. Felt the preternatural sense of déjà vu. The world changed again, like a curtain had been pulled back, a lever had been pulled. Felt the stiffness of his body, the machinery that made him human locking up and the surreal, phantasmal feeling of weightlessness—and like a spider he now had multiple eyes and was seeing multiple things at once. He, a ghost, hovering invisibly above the physical world in which he still lived. Another was the mad woman screaming, demanding to know why her wish had yet to be granted, and then the third woman, clinging to the corpse of her husband, before she fell and suddenly he felt as though he was drowning, lungs full of fluid, suffocating tight. His childhood self watching all this through feverish eyes.

Head spinning, he closed his eyes, breathed in, breathed out. Opened his eyes.

Ascended the roots.

The rock loomed.

The cauldron bubbled.

The tree watched.

Moments later he sat on the shaft of the back rock. Chest heaving, lungs tight, fingers stinging, bones tight. He ignored the burn and ascended the trunk.

“Give her back.” He demanded of the trunk. Climbed as fast as he dared. Saw himself suspended in hair, the cauldron bubbling and hungry beneath the branches in which he clung. Felt the limbs shake, as if to brush him off.

He would not let it. “You know why I’ve come!” he demanded, slamming his foot in the bark. “You know why! What you did! You set this in emotion, since the day you summoned my grandmother, since the day you tempted my mother with the promise of my father’s life, with mine! Grandmother kept her bargain. Mother _died_ for hers. You’ve no right to take more! None!” he beat the bark with his foot and fist, his grip fierce upon the bark though it bit and scrapped at his palm.

Silence save the creak of branches.

“Answer me!”

A wind, swift and sudden and sharp swept out from the distant tree line. Blew over the clearing, twisted, flew up like a crack of a whip against him, slapping his cheek and blowing his hair wildly about, sucked his cloak against him.

Yami shrieked, screamed, cried out and frustration, grabbed and pulled at the branches and twigs, ripped and the leaves, leaned closer and snatched a handful of roots. Pulled, grasped. Bit his teeth until they came loose. Almost lost his grip when they came loose. Screamed more, realizing it was a given victory and continued his assault.

“Let her go!” he thrashed and screamed. “Give her back! Let her be with Koichi! She’s given so much! Too much! She doesn’t deserve this! Please!” Tears came hot, pricked, streaming and rivered down his face, drops exploded on the leaves and bark and his bark-scrapped, sap-stained hands. “Please…” A beg, an actual plead. “Please.”

The rock began to shake. The cauldron boiled. The tree trembled, knocking him loose.

He pitched forward, fell long enough to suck in a single breath before he crashed through the glossy surface of the water and blackness sluished over him. Gritty, oily, cold liquid seeping into his mouth his ears, He fought, clawed, through the mud and the sticky remains of dead things, gave a great cry and pulled himself upward over—and then the water cleared, no longer thick and murky and sticky with decay, but a star strung blackness like the universe trapped in a bowl. Felt himself turned upright, floating and when he opened his mouth to breath it was hair, not muck he inhaled.

Through another’s eyes he saw, experienced another who’d fallen into this place. Felt her curl, despondent into a feeble position, her eyes weeping, her hair floating all about her like writhing black snakes, lost, broken. And then a voice—

_ARE YOU GIVING UP?_

It asked her—voice ancient and universal, tempered with the wisdom of a thousand grievances.

_HE GAVE HIS LIFE TO SAVE YOURS? IS THIS HOW YOU WILL REPAY THAT LOVE? BY LETTING HIS SACRIFICE BE IN VAIN?_

The woman pulled her eyes away. Yami saw her face. Recognized her.

 _WILL YOU LET THAT LOVE_ _PERISH? FORSAKE THE SEED OF THAT LOVE GROWING IN YOUR BELLY?_

He saw her witch red eyes widened, understanding dawn upon her, hands cup her belly, feeling the proof of her love, the secret her very body had fought so hard to tell her through the haze of her grief.

He saw the determination that overcame her. Recognized it, every time her husband beat her, every time he thought to turn his rage against her son—a resolution, a resolve, a resilience born of strength through grief.

“No.” she declared and he watched his mother ascend from the pool, no longer the woman she was, different than before, weep once more over the corpse of his father, but now her tears where of joy, pressing his cold hand to the small bump of her belly. Says goodbye. Allows the tree to wrap herself round his corpse and do what trees do and carry the prayers of the living towards the heavens.

He feels himself falling upwards, gravity in reverse pushing him, crashed through the glass of the cauldron and it shattered like a window as he ascends and pulls himself over the lip of the spring, coughing, wheezing hacking. Grabs the roots for support. Feels something slithering around his waist—branches, arms, both. Lifting him.

He pivots back finds himself sprawled in a palm of leaf woven vines, the upcurled branches forming fingers.

Looks back.

Sees.

Sees with witch eyes that have the sight. Sees the fae hiding in the trees. The monsters in the water. The goddess in the threes.

Sees the tree itself, rising, bending backwards, pitching forward as if a thing alive. Rising up, impossibly tall, dwarfing the trees and the surrounding bog—a dark, writhing common. A tree and yet vaguely human in shape. Its trunk a torso, thick and full like an oak, body slender, sleek as sister willow, its ribs the thick ropy vines of apple and linden, leaves a dress or gown glistening green and blue like iridescent beetle wings sprinkled with white star flowers, clusters of gold and ruby. Her long arms clawed and barren hawthorn branches. The roots twist into two great legs, each one tearing free from the rock, cracking it open like a shell as she stood, walked. The lovely face a long seed-shaped oval. Her crown the shiny stars of hawthorn and bells of linden atop a thorny plate: blooming roots and stobs, the headdress of a queen.

 _Vir’ava,_ Yami thought unable to voice the prayer. Tsarina of Trees, Mother of All Leshis, She Who Chooses the Guardian of the Dark Forest. The Forest Mother.

She reached down a terrible arm into the cauldron that was no longer a black, viscous cauldron of death and decay but a star-strung blue-black galaxy, a spiral of universe, of times, and spaces far beyond the depths of his world. She stretched out the long branches of her fingers, clenched it tight in her fists and pulled it free. The cauldron’s surface shattered with a high crack like glass of a broken window and released it into the sky. The world came apart and pulled itself back together in a horrible ripping and the monster’s hand enclosed over Yami, lifting him to the face

A face where two knotholes of eyes shone with a furious white light.

Rolled him in her palm until he became flush with those two shinning eyes.

And in those eyes as all the secrets of the universe and the world and his own past, and his own family.

And Yami saw.

He saw everything.

First, the void: suffocating, infinite,

His sense return one by one. First his eyes open, and he can see two red-eyed woman standing over him, smiling. Smell the clotted stench of earth upturned from its bed. Feel their tears, warm and wet bursting upon his cheek. Her them saying his name and blessings to the goddess over and over again like a chant. His mother holds him tight, her arms are warm.

Child Yami who should’ve died from the snake’s poison is now alive, oblivious to the price his mother paid so he may live—his life for hers, but the creature is not without mercy and she will have many years with him yet before the creature comes to claim what is hers. His grandmother looks away, grim, will do nothing to stop her daughter from taking him away—knowing she has no right to him now that she has decided his future without his consent. And now when next she sees him it will be when he sings the mourning song, and the confirmation that she will never see Svetlana again.

He descends again, through time and space—a kaleidoscope of light and memories, shadows and spells. Svetlana looks at him, her eyes sad. Her smile loving. Sees her again—Svetlana, as a new mother, cutting carrots in the kitchen, Yami in a sling on her back playing with her dark hair—his witch eyes already bright and red. Svetlana looks over her shoulder smiling. Kisses his cheek when he rests his head on her shoulder—her true love found at long last.

He stands in the kitchen, can smell the soup cooking on the stove, the herbs drying over the sink. Hears the water simmering in a pot. Down the hall, another sound steals his attention. When he turns around the kitchen is gone and finds himself in a living room, the floor is hardwood, the soft glow in the window is later evening.

He sees his mother, again, younger, lovelier, her face light and alive with all the innocence and joy of a woman who has never known the pain of loss. She spins in a blue flower-print pinnifore in the arms of a man he has never seen, and yet is somehow familiar.

They are foils of each other—her skin, fair and frosty, smooth as lilies and soft as lace, his is the warm brown of caramel, rough and calloused from hard word and yet gentle with her. His fair hair and soft beard, a sunshine yellow with a burnish gold of soft embers is the perfect contrast to the shadowy darkness of Svetlana’s flowing curves. Her cheeks soft and flushed, main for smiling, his sharp and hawk-like, she slender and small like the willow tree, he tall and gruff and strong—an oak made man. Her witch eyes, the bright flame of glowing garnets, his the soft, pale blue of the summer sky. And in his eyes and in his smile, there is only love—the one man Svetlana calls her own, her heart his.

And just like that Yami knows his name.

“Alek.” A tear streaked his cheek. His mother’s brave defender. “Papa.”

He watches the two figures dance—the world disappearing around them—flashes of image: Svetlana as a little girl hiding from the _domovoi_ hiding in the walls. Svetlana arguing with her mother, who is harder on her than all her other children, for she is the last one, the only one who can take her place. Svetlana, escaping through the fence of bones and disappearing into the dark of the woods, the house weeping, her mother screaming—singing the mourning song.

Svetlana as an infant in her mother’s arms. The witch gives birth to her along, _He_ does not know about this child, and she cannot tell him—it would hurt too much. For this will be her last child. The Baba keeps her close to her, tied to apron strings in a way Ivan and Fenis and Yelena were not. And then it is not Svetlana the Baba holds in her arms, but Yelena, and then Fenis, then Ivan—all her children who have brought her both pride and pain, glory and grief. The Baba as a young mother, teaching her children and watching them run. The Baba was a young woman, her hair not iron gray but long and sleek and black as night. The Baba dancing barefoot in a glade beneath the full moon with the Rusulka, dancing with a shadow shaped like a man.

And then he sees the two dancing figures are no longer his parents—Svetlana has no become the Baba when she was young, Alek’s skin has paled, his hair dark, his eyes, bold and bright, and Yami recognized him instantly as _He_ …

Koichi, the Deathless.

His Grandfather.

The Baba Yaga’s one true love.

They are lost together in a void of time in space. He holds her tight in his arms, determined to be with her in death, even as he continued on in life.

She laces her hand in his.

“You can’t save me, Koichi,” she whispers, and gone from her voice is all the pain and bitterness the world and life and duty and all its rejections and bitterness has wrought upon her. She touches the bead at her neck, small as a butterfly’s egg—an actual butterfly’s egg frozen in glass and only now does Yami realize truly what it is. “But I will keep your life safe, whether it is in this world or the next.”

Cups her cheek. Sees the color drain from her face. Smiles, sad and loving. “No matter how many women I’ve taken to wife, no matter how much love I’ve given this life. The world can have my souls, but my heart has always belonged to you.” He kisses her withered cheek. “Nadya.”

The Baba Yaga’s true name.

The Name she sealed in exchange for her duty.

Yami reached for them, but then the vision shattered and the world once again reshapes. No longer is he in a living room, or a kitchen or the Deathless’ bed chamber—the curtains become vines leafy and, festooned. The kitchen cabinets splinter and darken the color of tree bark. The Baba Yaga has become a tree: her legs have taken root, her ten toes bursting and punched through the floor. Flowers burst from her knees. Her fingers lengthen and spread, sprout leaves like twigs, her arms darkening and roughen to bark and branches. Her hair a crown of full summer leaves: the slender ellipses of willow, the golden catkins of oak, the bell shaped stars of little white lidden blossoms and there are white lights glowing in the two knotholes of her eyes.

 _SHE HAS SERVED THE DARK WOOD DUTIFULLY._ Her voice deepens as she speaks, From her cheek vines sprout, curling like infant’s fingers. Fingers sprout vines, leaves, flowers, then shrivel and brown.

She stands before him, in the kitchen of the Walking House he has come to call home.

“You are her.” He says. “Vir’ava. The Forest Mother.”

The creature bows its head. Her hair a festoon crown of flowers that ripen: thick full leaves and hidden pods that dry and color: flaming golds and scarlets and purples among thick jewel-like fruits, then shrivel and fall with the brown leaves until only bare black branches remain, tiny red buds and golden catkin curls promising a repetition of the cycle.

_I AM THE EARTH, AND THE WOOD AND THE SOIL. I AM THE BORDER OF THIS GREENLAND AND THE WORLD BEYOND IT. I AM EVERY LEAF AND FLOWER AND SEED THAT HAS EVER GROWN ON ANY TREE, AND EVERY FLOWER, AND FERN AND PLANT THAT HAS EVER TAKEN ROOT. I AM LIFE. I AM DECAY. I AM DEATH. I AM REBIRTH. I AM._

The Vir’ava’s face weaves anew. Vines bursting from its body, the floorboards and the ceiling creak and grown and crack and splinter as the creature grows. Reshapes. Grows.

“I’m not afraid of you!” Yami protests even as the house shakes, groans, crumbles and the only home he’s ever known begins to tear itself apart.

“You have my mother! You have my father! You cannot have her! She’s not yours to take!”

_YOU CANNOT CHANGE HER PATH. SHE IS DESTINED TO DO MY WORK. TO DO THE DUTY OF SHE WHO PROTECTS THE DARK FOREST._

“You will not take her!” Yami screamed, protesting. “She has given enough for your duty and your cause! Her children, her happiness, her husband—”

_THE BABA YAGA HAS NO HUSBAND. NO MORE THAN THE DEATHLESS CAN TAKE A LOVER._

It was Yami’s turn to laugh. “You know that’s a lie. _Nadya_ _is_ his wife, and he _is_ her lover. Perhaps not in ceremony but in every way the universe and life and death recognizes marriage. You know I’m right, that’s why you called me. Chose _me._ Demanded my Mother’s life in exchange for _me._ Choose me and set Nadya free.”

_OH LITTLE MOUSE, LITTLE FOOL. WHAT WOULD YOU TRADE FOR HER HAPPINESS?_

“What I was always meant to do.” He pressed a hand to his heart. Resolve burning his garnet eyes ruby. No doubt nor hesitation clouded his voice. “I will take her place. Choose me as the new She Who Protects the Dark Forest and release _Nadya_ from her bondage.” He sank all his resolve into her name.

_YOU WILL TAKE HER PLACE?_

He does not hesitate. Gives only a single nod.

She laughs and now the walls are collapsing. She explodes out of it in a tangle of thorns and vines and bones, and the house screams.

Yami holds onto the house, soothes it, restores it from memory, replacing it, rebuilding it board by board until it is once more a single structure—alive and happy and whole. It recognizes him as its new master. The architect of its heart and soul. Outside the Mortar and pestle stand in attention, ascend into the sky and bolt through wood and world to find him.

Catches him as he falls through the sky and the universe and rises him high above the trees and the woods and the Vir’ava. It takes him high above and over the Deathless castle, where Kochi, still young and strong, holds the small, withered form of Baba Yaga, now limp in his arms. A small tear drops on the tiny bead around her neck.

And a force far greater and stronger than any magic breaks the glass shell, penetrates the tiny butterfly’s egg. Like a tiny glass bead, the egg cracks open and a caterpillar emerges, grows, spins its own chrysalises. A symbols of the both and Baba Yaga and itself transforming and bursting from the shell—a peacock butterfly that rises once, twice to fly then settles upon her heart, wings droop and, accepting death, vanishes in a glow within the Baba’s heart—and just like that, the Baba was free and Nadya breathed her first new breath.

Her hair, once black, now iron gray, fell back no longer dry and brittle but long, loose and flowing, her skin once withered smoothed, white as lilies. Her gaunt hands, moistened, her long fingers and cracked, yellow nails no longer creaked. Her hunched back straightened and she was once more the tall, slender woman she had been in youth. Experimented by placing her bare feet on the floor. Found her legs no longer aches. Her skin free of ages spots, her violet eyes, round and no longer needed to squint to see.

Yami smiled as the Deathless pulled her into his arms, and she returned the embrace—ever the dutiful woman embracing her new role in the universe as the “egg” of the eternal life of the Deathless.

 _DO YOU SEE YOUR PATH_? Her voice emerged from the world.

“I do.”

_WILL YOU WALK IT?_

“I will.”

He said, pulled the crimson cloak tighter around his neck, a small comfort as he wiped away a tear for the loss of his grandmother but also of bliss for the woman who sacrificed so much, and at long last was reunited with her love.

_AND WHAT WILL YOU ASK?_

He looked at her surprise.

She laughed. Her voice no longer ancient with imperial hollow, but the gentle song of a breeze through the willows.

_SILLY MOUSE. DID YOU THINK HER FREEDOM TO BE YOUR REWARD? NO, SWEET CREATURE, YOUR NAME IS THE SEAL, YOUR ASCENTION LIBERATES HERS. BUT NOW YOU MUST ASK FOR SOMETHING IN RETURN. THAT IS THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE. FOR EVERY CRUELTY THERE IS A MERCY. FOR EVER KILL THERE IS KINDNESS. FOR EVERY SACRIFICE THERE IS A REWARD._

Yami looked into her glowing eyes without fear, and she looked like the magnificent tree who was the world: her flowering branches the heaven, her trunk the ecosystem of the earth her roots, the tangled web of the underworld.

“I ask for the same thing, as my Mother and Grandmother before me. For my true love.”

Her laughter was a loud, blissful things: the twinkling of stars and the celebration of summer and the singing of birds and the rattling of cicadas. And as she spiraled towards the heavens to disappear back into the earth—he felt the whole world reshape into something that was both terrifyingly new and wonderful, and yet warmly and heartbreakingly familiar.

X X X

And so Adrik Yurlov, known more commonly by his “true” name Yami, become the new Baba Yaga, the new witch in the woods whose name was the seal that bound him to the Dark Forest and the Gate Between Worlds, and replaced his grandmother, now known as Nadya, the last wife of Koichi the Deathless, and inherited her Mortar and Pestle, her House that dances on chicken’s feet, her garden of herbs and bugs, her hound, her birch and her cat.

He does not mind the duty. He has prepared for it all his life, though he did not know it when he was young. He does not mind his duty of ushering along the dying the delivering the yet to be born, healing the sick and tending to the beast. His house is an eager partner—always eager to run and move and dance. The gate of bones are lively guardians, always eager to await his welcome and the oil he places on their hinges. Only the birch complains, for though he prunes her branches and keeps them tied, she finds he is no longer as easy to tease as he was when he a lad, and finds she is longer the prettiest in his garden. The garden itself is a crude thing compared to the Deathless’ gift to his grandmother, but Yami cares for it deeply, and tends to it lovelingly.

The hound and the cat are loyal companions, and he is both grateful and eager for his company.

There is freedom in this life, away from society’s restraints and certain liberties he cannot have in that world. Never will he give up flying in a mortar.

Sometimes, he finds it a lonely life, but he knows the Vir’ava works in mysterious ways, as the world and the universe often do. He knows to be patient, though he confesses he is eager to meet this mysterious true love. He does not know if it will be a lover like his grandmother, or a child like his mother’s. But he is patient and he is willing, even as the years roll on and he does not age. Even after his crimson coat as grown old and ratted and he patches it with furs tanned from the forest and feathers he finds from fallen birds and created pins and buttons from the skulls of small birds. Even after loneliness has become a beast that claws at his heat and he finds himself alone and cold at night curled up in the thick furs of the loft he slept in since he was a child—he just can’t bring himself to sleep on the stove.

Still he is patient.

Still he is eager.

Even as he doubts.

Even as he wonders.

Wonders at the Vir’ava’s words. Her words.

He did not understand the full extent of the vir’ava’s promise, until a spunky boy calling himself Yugi, the grandchild of someone Nadya knew well, found his way onto his doorstep and looking up at him with bright jeweled eyes, the deep purple-violet of one descendant from magic—demanded to become his apprentice.

And in that moment Yami knew, the Vir’ava and the universe had, indeed, kept their promise.

**Author's Note:**

> Vir'ava—lit. “Forest Mother”
> 
> “Alek”—Russian form of Alexander. Lit. Defender, protector
> 
> “Nadya” Russian name meaning “Hope”
> 
> so...this is the end of this little five-part event though, I plan on this being a huge part of the climax in the book and yes i will be turning The Bone Mother's Grandchild and the Walking House into an Original story...maybe a too part story, one with Yami's youth, another detailing his time with Yugi--I can see Yugi in a feverish haze thinking Yami means to cook him when he starts the bath, but we shall see :) 
> 
> Many more horror themed one shots to come!


End file.
